On occasion you may have the desire to demonstrate a new app that you’ve developed for the iPad or just share a website at a meeting. While iPad 2 and the new iPad have built-in capabilities which allow mirroring to directly-connected projectors and televisions/monitors, how can you share with remote participants?

I recently attended the TabTimes Tablet Strategy conference, an event specifically targeting the use of tablets in the enterprise. End users, hardware and software vendors, and journalists descended on New York to discuss the highs and lows of tablet deployments in healthcare, education, retail, government, manufacturing and other industries.

Just over two years ago in 2010, the first iPad was launched, creating a new form factor now being called a media tablet. In 2011, the iPad 2 as well as dozens of other products hit the streets. Now the third version of iPad (current called the iPad, the new iPad, iPad 3, etc.) is flying off of the shelves.

One of the mind-blowing things is how quickly media tablets have progressed from the consumer market to the corporate ranks. Just a year ago media tablets were sort of a novelty or a status symbol.

Virtualization is a major industry trend. Server virtualization is especially popular in many corporate data centers. Veeam Software publishes a V-index which monitors server virtualization in the enterprise and their 2011 third quarter report showed that over one-third (38.9%) of all enterprise servers were virtual. While desktop virtualization is not as popular, surveys indicate that almost ¾ of organizations are evaluating or using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. These products use hypervisors, which are software programs that manage multiple instances of the same operating system on one computer.

I often hear people describe the mobile computing industry as ‘immature’. For some reason, this really irks me. Cell Phones and PDAs have been popular since the 90’s and smartphones started gaining momentum in the early 2000’s. Now, of the 7 billion people in the world, nearly 6 billion of them have a cellular subscription (Source: ITU).

We’ve been using computers to enhance our world for many years. We’ve even used computers to built our own imaginary worlds through the magic of virtual reality. Augmented reality (AR) is the use of virtual reality in combination with the real world to provide an enhanced experience for the user. One of the more common examples is in football (the US version) where a computer-generated line is shown on television for the first down marker. As real world items (players, objects) pass in front of it, the portion of the line that would be behind the item disappears (called occlusion). It has been featured in several sci-fi flicks such as the Predator movies, the Terminator series, Minority Report, Avatar and the Iron Man movies.

There was no shortage of action in the mobile industry in 2011. So what will 2012 bring? There are plenty of 2012 doomsday prophecies, so you’d better go out and get that smartphone or tablet that you’ve been drooling over early in the year so that you can at least have some fun before the end is here. Now, on to happier topics. Read the rest of this post »

Mobile device management (MDM) is a hot area with enterprises today. Gone are the days of IT dictating the devices, or even the operating systems. The complexity of managing multiple mobile platforms has brought this cottage industry into the mainstream. For proof, look no further than the dozens of MDM product offerings. As the name implies, these products focus on managing (and securing) mobile devices.